A 15 days of Halloween mini review
Day 13
Written and directed by Gareth Evens of The Raid (2011) fame, Apostle (2018) is a turn of the century fantasy-horror about a bizarre religious sect.
I’ve got to be honest, i mostly just wanted to watch it because I like Dan Stevens films, especially his performance in The Guest. (Wingard, 2014) I think people who are big Raid fans would probably have got a bit more out of it than me.
Thomas (Dan Stevens) is sent on a mission to infiltrate a religious group living on a remote island who are holding his sister for ransom.
The group is so mysterious that Thomas has no idea what type of beliefs he is to play along with to keep his cover.
The religious leader of the island; Malcolm (Michael Sheen) venerates a female deity who rescued him and his two fellow founders from the sea when they first arrived at the island.
The community is in turmoil because instead of helping the crops to grow the unhappy deity is causing a blight with poison crops and deformed baby lambs.
Malcolm knows an interloper is in their midst and will do anything to protect his goddess so Thomas is in constant peril.
There are curfews ever evening, and on arrival the new pilgrims must each fill a glass with their own blood as an offering. We see that the woman/deity lives below the floor and is some kind of vampire. So far so creepy.
The first half introduces an atmospheric medieval land that could have been something out of Dark Souls and was a very intriguing prospect. Another man reveals himself to be a spy and is killed with Pikes which was unusual and cool.
Unfortunately, the second half then descends into a bit of an aimless romp with a totally different tone to the first. I watched the first half alone then had to stop and come back later. I watched the second half with Murray and we were just in fits of laughter at the tone and pacing. I had to almost apologetically explain that the first half had actually been quite good.
One of the bizarre things about Apostle is that Dan Stevens (perhaps because of the turn of the 20th century setting) has to play the whole movie strung out due to his characters drug addiction.
What I’d describe as a Sherlock Holmes stylisation to the movement of the camera and actors works well to begin with but then serves to add to the comic tone later on with people flying about in all directions.
I think, based on director Evans’ background with martial arts, they had tried to bring a bit of what had made The Raid successful to Apostle and it just didn’t fit in. That said, we did have a good time during the second half even if it wasn’t for the right reasons.
One of the themes of Apostle is father and daughter relationships. We get subplots involving the founders and their children. We think we are seeing a bad father and a good father and that gets flipped.
SPOILERS
We also get the theme of hatred towards women. At the end of the movie we discover that the bringer of life who saved them on the shore was captured and subjugated by Quinn the misogynist control freak who has brutally murdered his own daughter by cutting out her womb. Quinn threatens the other two main women in the film with also cutting out their wombs to feed to the deity. There is an irony to this male dominated society where women’s bodies are policed but the society can only exist due to the body of the woman/deity.
as Andrea & Ffion
The women in the Apostle are healers, comforters, or true believers. Andrea (Lucy Boynton) is modern and has an interest in science, whereas the deity is mysterious and exists as part of nature; bringing life and possibly death. (Although she drinks blood and her misery blights the crops we don’t actually see her act in violence towards anyone)
These are all quite interesting themes that Evans has written into his story my only concern is that in the climax the woman don’t feel like they have much agency. Despite breaking free from their chains it feels that they are ultimately rescued by Thomas.
There are moments of Apostle that are bad, but in some ways it’s so rare to see this type of fantasy film nowadays that I think it is still worth a watch. I’d be interested to know if there were budget problems during the second half of the shoot because it reminded me of how in Texas Chainsaw 3 they had tried to be so ambitious that when the money started to run out everything turned into a bit of a jumbled rush. Maybe a bigger budget would have really helped some of the great ideas in Apostle to come out fully formed.
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